ON OBAMA BEING A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER / IT'S ABOUT BEING IN SERVICE

Newsweek: Do you think the time that Obama spent organizing was important to his political career? 
  

Kellman: " I think it was the pivotal public experience of his public life. It's where his basic orientation in public life was formed. He learned that the way to get things done is to get people to work together, even though they may not like each other. His sense of compromise also developed there. Basically you carve out your ethical limits and make sure to never cross them but, within them, understand the need to use compromise to get things done. There's also his comfort with narrative. What he did was take this passion he had for story, which brought him to the brink of wanting to try being a novelist and short story writer, and began to use it as an organizer. That's the way he communicates still. Even one to one, sometimes his staff has to pull him away from a conversation because he's so eager to get people's story. A lot of that orientation was formed in organizing, his sense of what it means to be outside of things."